


and i have never felt the difference (a child in all these labels)

by princessoftheworlds



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Bisexuality, Canon Bisexual Character(s), Canon Relationships, Internalized Biphobia, Written for Bisexuality Visibility Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26609965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds
Summary: Bisexuality: a study in five parts, in five characters.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 47





	and i have never felt the difference (a child in all these labels)

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Bisexuality Visibility Day!
> 
> Okay, so here's the thing: Everyone's experience with their bisexuality is different. I didn't grow up in a 1990s or early 2000s UK or Japan, and so although I attempted to capture these characters' journeys with their sexuality in accordance with what I've read and learned about and with my own personal headcanons, I'm not perfect. If anything feels inauthentic - or for which I'm extremely sorry in advance - offensive, please let me know immediately so that I can change them accordingly. 
> 
> Some of Torchwood's perspectives of or journeys with bisexuality, especially Tosh's, stem from my own as someone living closeted in an Asian household. Please do consider that as you read.
> 
> I didn't really mean to throw in a whole paragraph here, so I'm gonna let you go. I hope you enjoy this fic, or at least my take on the team's bisexuality. Have a great day!
> 
> (Title is from Alanis' Interlude from Maniac by Halsey.)

**Gwen**

When Gwen is a young girl, family friends and strangers alike are always enchanted by her lovely green doe eyes, sweet gap-toothed smile, and polite manners.

“Oh, little Gwennie’s going to have all the boys wrapped around her fingers,” they coo to Geraint; never mind that she’s often told off for fighting those very said boys who tease her and her friends on the playground.

When these same comments are repeated to young Gwen, her eyes widen with incredulity. “Why would I marry a rude boy?” she asks. “I’m going to marry Annabeth!” 

In fact, at age seven, Gwen, wearing one of Geraint’s old dress shirts, is married for the first time to a blushing Annabeth, veiled in a white curtain. Their celebration lasts approximately twenty minutes before Gwen drops Annabeth’s new doll, dirtying her dress, and the girls launch into one of their frequent squabbles.

By thirteen, Annabeth grows into a pretty, smooth-cheeked girl while Gwen remains awkwardly lanky. She will not mature into her body until a few years later. One afternoon, Annabeth confesses her crush on Peter from school, and Gwen, for the life of her, cannot see what Annabeth sees in the boy.

A year later, Annabeth moves away, but it isn’t a decade later until Gwen realizes that she’d been a little bit in love with her best friend.

In high school, Gwen finally feels the same attraction to boys that Annabeth did. Her first boyfriend is Peter, the very Peter of Annabeth’s dreams, and they snog with too much teeth and tongue, in his back garden for the first time. A few weeks later, she fumbles her way through giving him her first handjob and humps his thigh until she pretends to come. Some nights, she still imagines kissing Annabeth’s soft lips, knowing far too well that not every girl feels this way. 

She voices these desires to no one.

College comes and brings Rhys. She’s very much in love with him, but her gaze is still occasionally drawn to pretty girls and curvy women. It takes her at least a year of dating to sit Rhys down and tell him that she thinks she’s always also been attracted to girls too.

When she cringes away, expecting rejection, Rhys takes her hands in his warm ones. “Gwen, darling,” he begins, “I don’t care who you’re attracted to. You’re still Gwen Cooper. I love you.”

Gwen closes her eyes and sighs in relief.

It’s not until Torchwood that Gwen kisses her first woman, but considering the circumstances she found herself snogging Carys and the lack of both their clear consents, she doesn’t count it. 

Still, for the first time, Gwen is among other people who are exactly like her. She’s attracted to Jack, yes, anyone would be, but she also admires the way he’s so open about his attractions, even if occasionally, his flirting drives her up the wall. But he still gives her the same easy smile that he does Ianto.

Jack gives her the confidence to embrace the fact that she’s attracted to both men and women, even if the only people who know are Rhys and her team.

Gwen Cooper was born bisexual, is bisexual, and being happily married to Rhys doesn’t change that in the slightest.

* * *

**Ianto**

Perceptive even as a boy, Ianto observes the rest of the boys his age enough to know that not everyone watched James Bond movies over and over for Sean Connery or dreamed about Han Solo with the same reverence he held for Princess Leia and her iconic gold bikini.

Even age eight, Ianto knows better than to discuss any of this with his father as to not incur any more of his wrath, and he doesn’t have many friends to talk to about the odd fluttering in his stomach when he sees Harrison Ford as Han Solo or Indiana Jones.

Ianto badly wishes to be “normal,” even if he isn’t entirely sure what it means.

He kisses his first girl at fourteen, in the park where he and the other boys frequently discuss girls from their school. Ianto often finds himself chiming in to avoid catching their doubt, no matter that Dylan with the green eyes is prettier than Anna Jeffries. 

Starting at sixteen, he has a few short-lived relationships with girls, but none of them really catch his interest; he loses his virginity to Ceri Thomas, his neighbor’s cousin, when she visits the estate.

No one comes close to discovering one of his most well-hidden secrets, except Glenda Jones. She approaches him carefully via a conversation about ABBA and gently asks if he has anything that’s been weighing on him that he’d like to tell her, but he steadfastly refuses.

Ianto wars with his attraction to both men and women, not because he believes it’s sinful or disgusting but only because of the societal prejudice around it. He feels the same guilt for his bisexuality, a word he discovers with much difficulty by fifteen and that has connotations he would prefer to avoid, as he does for anything his father doesn’t deem “normal.”

The months he’s in London searching for his father slightly normalize bisexuality for him; London is where he kisses his first man and gives and receives several awkward handjobs and blowjobs, all before Torchwood.

Lisa Hallet is gorgeous, with dark, clever eyes and a smile brighter than the sun, and Ianto can’t figure out for the life of him why she decides to continue with him even after their failed date. At Torchwood London, with Yvonne and Lisa, he comes to grow more comfortable with his sexuality, to the point where he’ll allow himself to publicly drool over Kieran. (To be fair, Kieran looks like he stepped off a magazine centerfold.)

Lisa doesn’t make a big deal of Ianto confessing his bisexuality to her, which he appreciates; he only presses a swift kiss to his cheek and tells him she loves and accepts him. 

Like Lisa, Jack has a sunshine smile but also a booming laugh; he just radiates energy and charisma, and it’s no wonder that Ianto ends up caught up in his web. He’s comfortable enough with his sexuality at this point that he feels minimal guilt over sleeping with Jack, but a relationship is a bit different.

Jack opens Ianto to a whole spectrum of human sexuality beyond solely being comfortable with his own, yet when Ianto opens up to Rhiannon, he stretches the truth a bit when he says it’s just Jack. Ianto’s decade-plus of struggle cannot be summed down to one word.

Ianto Jones loves Jack just as much as he did Lisa. He’s bisexual, and he’s comfortable with that. Maybe one day he’ll be able to be more open about it.

* * *

**Owen**

Seven-year-old Owen Harper becomes renowned on the playground when he jumps off a swing and badly fractures his left arm. When his mum begrudgingly takes him to the doctor’s, he becomes fascinated with the human skeleton and pores over a chart until he can recite all the bones from memory. The next time some boy jumps off a swing, Owen’s right by his side, telling him exactly which bones he broke. That earns Owen his own broken nose, but he punches his attacker right back.

His reputation as the weird bone-obsessed, temperamental kid carries over into high school when he becomes notorious for being caught snogging girls in cupboards. It is in one of these closets that he loses his virginity to redhaired Joanna Duffy.

Being attracted to boys isn’t even a blip on Owen’s radar for the longest time; he grew up in London, he’s heard of gay people even if he doesn’t personally know any, and he knows that some people in his neighborhood accept them more than others.

Fifteen-year-old Owen honestly doesn’t care until a squabble with Tom Wilkes in the abandoned school corridor leads to him shoving Tom against a wall and messily snogging him. He didn’t even mean to do that; it just happened.

After a few months of questioning and some research with the same methodical approach he takes to medicine, he realizes that his correct label would be “bisexual,” although he never really uses it.

Still, Owen’s attraction to boys suddenly kicks in with the same fervor as his attraction to girls, and by age sixteen, he’s gotten down on his knees for quite a few boys - or reverse - behind the school sports shed.

At college, he gains a bit of a reputation as the campus slut. He’ll pick up someone at the pub in the evening, mostly girls but also the occasional bloke, and then roll into class the next morning, thoroughly hungover. His classmates, the ones he hasn’t slept with at least, don’t understand how he’s still acing the exams, coming in nearly the top of all his classes. 

Medical school is a bit different. Owen spends a few more nights of the week hastily cramming than at the pub, but the occasional free weekend is still for clubbing and shagging his way through London. All of his relationships are with girls and short-lived.

Until he meets Katie at Cardiff Royal Infirmary and falls hard for her. Their time together, although unbelievably happy, is unexpectedly brief, and when Katie dies, Owen joins Torchwood but also hardens.

He falls back into his old habits from college, trying to drown his grief with liquor and blowjobs from indiscriminate parties. He shags quite a few girls in backalleys and is shagged by blokes nearly as often. 

With time, Owen finally returns to a new even keel, surrounded by the most bisexuals he’s ever seen in one room. He shags Gwen, falls for Diane, and becomes closer to his team. He makes a few passes at Ianto; apparently, the other man doesn’t consider Owen’s offer for a threesome with Tosh to be legitimate.

Owen’s never really had a problem with his attraction to men and women, but when Jack tells him he’s proud of how uncompromising Owen is about his identity, Owen sheds a few secret tears.

Owen Harper may never really use the label of bisexual, but he knows that’s what he is, and he knows he shares that with his team.

* * *

**Tosh**

Young Toshiko is raised on Japanese fables and European fairy tales as much as she is on math and science.

Her head will be full of numbers and formulas and code, but her heart always longs for romance. She wants to be in love, just like her parents are; their love has survived a decade, a daughter and a son, and two countries.

After her family returns to London, Tosh is perpetually lonely, head buried in books while the other children laugh and play on the swings. It’s not that she doesn’t long to join them, but no one asks, no one invites her. 

Well, not no one.

By age fifteen, Tosh has suffered through painful crush after painful crush on boys who never give her time of day, but one day, Claire, who Tosh has spoken to once, turns around in class and invites Tosh to go shopping. When Tosh agrees and Claire smiles brightly, Tosh’s heart is set aflutter like it never has before.

She’s always known that there were men who loved men and women who loved women out there in the world, and her parents have always encouraged her and her brother to converse with them as scientists and researchers, yet there’s always been this slight taboo around bringing up same-sex relationships. 

Tosh tried once but only received a vague hum from her father and a furrowed brow from her mother. It was enough to deter her from bringing it up again.

Kind and witty, Claire becomes one of Tosh’s only friends as a teen, but Tosh never gets used to how giddy she feels around the other girl. She eventually kisses a boy, but her painful crushes never stop, although they now extend across both boys and girls.

As they attend college, Claire and Tosh fall out of touch. Tosh loses her virginity to a boy in her natural language processing class. She is always too terrified to approach the women she finds attractive, too terrified of rejection, too terrified of what will happen if they don’t reject her. 

Her early and mid-twenties are mostly lonely but with the occasional short-lived relationship, and Tosh yearns for love, to love, to be loved.

Opportunity strikes at Torchwood when she meets Owen and sees the way he bleeds his grief. Tosh falls hard but knows Owen will never reciprocate. It isn’t enough to stop her painful yearning.

Tommy is kind, like Claire, but is there so fleetingly, only once a year. Tosh could see herself loving him, but she doubts they’ll ever get a chance.

What Tosh doesn’t expect is Mary, this gorgeous, fierce, imposing woman who batters her way into Tosh’s heart and bed, introducing her to a wonder of the universe that will eventually grow into a curse. Finally, for once in her life, Tosh doesn’t feel shame about loving a woman, although the guilt of what her parents will think is a whole different matter. 

But as is Tosh’s luck, Mary turns out to be a treacherous alien and is shot into the sun by Jack.

“Love suited you,” Gwen tells her, and Tosh wants to sob.

Love is all Tosh ever wants, and her heart is large enough that she can love anything, but those she loves never love her back. Or even worse, if they do, once they do, she loses them.

It’s a spoken fact of the universe; Toshiko Sato is bisexual and intelligent but unlucky in love.

* * *

**Jack**

The Doctor once tells Rose that by the fifty-first century, humanity has spread out among the stars, “dancing” with everyone they encounter.

That does nothing to describe how everything has changed by the time Javic is born on the tiny human colony of the Boeshane Peninsula, how open everyone is not only to their dance partners but also their romantic partners. Hearts are bigger, and so are minds. You love whom you love, and it matters not to anyone else, mostly.

Javic is born a playful, mischievous child, always teasing the other Boeshane children and chasing Gray. By ten years of age, he’s had consecutive crushes on children of all genders in his year, and his parents always amuse themselves with guessing who he’ll become attached to next week.

When Gray is lost and his father dies, Javic becomes shadowed. As he grows, his open, playful nature becomes less genuine, more of a protective shield to keep people from seeing the frightened, hurt boy inside. His flirting becomes more wild, more outrageous, and he loses his virginity at fifteen before engaging in teenage sexploits around Boeshane. It’s a small place, a tiny place, and alien visitors are rare, but Javic is always fascinated with them.

Javic’s first love is his childhood best friend; they are incredibly close, and Javic leads him to war - and to death. After that, he becomes a Time Agent, sleeps around indiscriminately across time and space, and closes his heart off.

When Jack meets the Doctor and Rose, the Doctor understands Jack’s nature, but Rose does not at first, which Jack chalks up to twenty-first century thinking. He laughs at how closed-minded primitive humans can be but doesn’t really understand until he’s trapped in the nineteenth century.

Jack has never felt ashamed about his open attraction and sexual prowess, but early humanity seems to want to punish him for his heart. Confined to Earth, his dalliances with men pushed into the shadows, he is almost fearful but never ashamed. He may always come back, but he still feels pain.

Time passes, and things change, but it seems, never fast enough. Torchwood, thankfully, has always had a refreshingly progressive approach to sexuality and gender, even if it’s not by much. Alice and Emily decreed it so, and thus, Jack does find some dance partners, but even those relationships remain hidden, like Torchwood. And Jack never stops being surprised by how closed-minded humans can be.

By the time the twenty-first century rolls around, Jack is tired, of the prejudice, of society’s needs to label everything. He can be a lot more open now about whom he takes into his bed than he could a century ago, but the dirty looks and ugly whispers and occasional punches still follow. 

He doesn’t mean to make his Torchwood a refuge for people like him, who don’t subscribe to the narrow-minded societal norm of sexuality and gender, but it happens and keeps happening, again, and again, and again.

Jack’s lovers have been rare gems of the universe - powerful and magnetic like the Doctor, moral and soft-hearted like Rose, chaotic and brilliant like John and River, cold yet passionate like Lucia, or quiet and witty and charming like Ianto. There’s been so many, and there will be so many more, in his bed and in his heart.

Humanity would call someone like Jack bisexual or pansexual, but he rejects labels, defies them. Love has no labels, and his home time understood that. Jack has a long time before he returns home, but thankfully, time is changing again, and with it, society.

The twenty-first century is when everything changes, and Jack has hope it will change for the better for him, for his team, and for other people like them.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [here](http://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/) or on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rajkumarinik). I tweet and reblog mostly Torchwood with occasionally amusing commentary on nonsense. Please come talk to me and tell me if/how much you like my fic or like ask me about it on tumblr; all my schoolwork has become remote now, and I have limited social interaction.


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